Let's talk about Grimwild, and why it's maybe my new favorite D&D replacement
Over the years, there's been a lot of tabletop RPGs that have attempted to bring over the structures and conventions of cinematic and story-driven indie tabletop RPGs and apply them to the themes, tropes, and stories associated with the ur-TTRPG that is Dungeons & Dragons, whether that's the messy and venerable Dungeon World or the more modern attempts like Daggerheart (not to mention the plethora of games that are interested in totally different things).
Now, I've been rather free of the gravitational pull of The Dragon/Elf Game for quite a while - I've not played D&D proper for 4 or 5 years now, and even been Pathfinder-free for a year or two as well, content to play the variety of smaller games totally orthogonal in terms of rules and theme to the fantasy dungeon-crawling and monster-killing game, so I am by no means in a position that resembles "I'm fed up with D&D but it's the only thing I know or want".
At the same time, every now and again, the craving for that very style of adventure strikes me, but after years of becoming so accustomed and comfortable with the Powered by the Apocalypse and especially Forged in the Dark styles of play (where a cinematic and character-driven focus, tidy rulesets, and short, sub-15 session campaigns and oneshots have long been my comfort zone), it feels daunting to imagine picking up a d20 game again; Outside of playing some OSR-adjacent games every now and again (or perhaps something like 13th Age, which I still haven't gotten to), I no longer desire beat-by-beat dungeon crawls and monster fights that can eat up whole sessions by themselves and make even seemingly short stories take up the better portion of a year (or god forbid several) - I am too cursed by ADHD to manage that as either player or GM.
So, right around New Year's Eve, along came Grimwild, an RPG by one J.D. Maxwell of Oddity Press I remembered looking at in summer last year when it was brought up on the Wildsea Discord server as it apparently had some inspiration from it, but was very confused by its somewhat rough (but understandably still beta) presentation at the time.
Since it was free and looked like an interesting mix of D&D themes and Blades in the Dark-style cinematic storytelling, I decided to dive in, and came out with an early contender for my 2025's game of the year.
So, what does Grimwild, which proudly labels itself as Cinematic Fantasy Adventure right on the cover, do that makes it stand out among the crowd?
Well, the good news is you can see for yourself immediately by grabbing the free edition (which, similar to Kevin Crawford's Without Number games, is a complete experience, but you get some fun extra goodies if you snag the physical or paid PDF version), but if you want some autistic girlboy's thoughts on it, head under the cut!
"What is a tabletop RPG?", "What is D&D about?" and "How do you play an RPG?" are two subjects that the internet at large will never fully agree on, but what I'm moreso interested in are games (and designers thereof) that are at least in some amount of agreement and alignment with my preferred answers to those questions (enough that I don't feel like I'm swimming upstream) - and from the very first pages, Grimwild excels at this in my eyes, as both its introduction as well as the player and GM principles echo a lot of the wisdom and ideas I've enjoyed and picked up in indie games like Blades in the Dark and Fate - I love to think of TTRPGs like movies and TV shows in terms of pacing, structure, and vocabulary (like the all-mighty camera), and evidently so does J.D. Maxwell.
I also enjoy some amount of player collaboration and GM-facing structure - I don't like to think of the GM as an omniscient authority (nor do I enjoy the stress that comes with that much power, from experience!), and Grimwild delivers on both fronts, with mechanics and advice that offer both sides of the table fun toys and clear guidelines to follow to ensure a consistent and smooth play experience.
But, it's not just about the theory that I already know and love from other TTRPGs - Grimwild brings plenty of fun rules and mechanics of its own, which feel familiar (to me at least) while still offering some novelty and honing in on its desired play experience - though at the time of writing I have not directly witnessed it firsthand, but stay tuned for a potential followup after I run my group through a oneshot or two!
The core mechanic should feel familiar to anyone who's played Blades in the Dark or Wildsea: roll a pool of d6 dice based on a stat and some bonuses, then look for the single highest result (6 is good, 3 or less is bad, and 4 or 5 is both; two or more 6s is a crit). Where it gets interesting is with thorns, optional d8 dice added if you're impeded by wounds, the environment, or other factors, which downgrade your result level if they come up on a 7 or 8 (which can stack, and potentially downgrade you to a particularly nasty disaster if you go below a 1-3).
The thorns strongly remind me of Wildsea's cut (where you remove X topmost dice from the pool after you roll it), but slighty less harsh, and both are an interesting way to directly alter the actual roll chances in a way that standard FitD doesn't really have any tools for (position and effect only kick in for the fiction after the fact, apart from perhaps -1d from level 2 harm in Blades).
Another notable mechanic are diminishing pools, which function as something akin to a dice-based take on progress clocks and tracks from the aforementioned games - a pool can represent some challenge, timer, or resource that can be triggered at various points in the game, wherein you roll the dice and decrement the pool for each 1-3 result. I have yet to see how it fully plays out in practice, but I love clocks and am always intrigued by different takes on the idea.
Grimwild also gives players (and even the GM!) some metacurrencies to play with - for PCs there's Spark (gained in various ways and used to boost rolls) and Story (used to declare significant character- or story arc-relevant world details) while GM gets Suspense to dole out harsher consequences (in a manner akin to Slugblaster's Bite, or even Discord from Tendencies: Spirits & Glamour, a PbtA game by a friend of mine). Some people find metacurrencies and especially GM metacurrencies contentious for reasons I am unbothered by, but I think they contribute greatly to a game like this.
Things like Story and Suspense, as well as other rules they tie into like Vantage (a sort of codified fictional positioning that helps abstract away matters like "would your PC have this item for this" or "can I narrate this action as this kind of magic"), Story Arcs (which come in both personal and group-wide flavors), player character relationship Bonds, and Quarrels (a way to quickly resolve player character drama in a way I adore envisioning in my head) is where Grimwild's cinematic elements really come out, at a pretty light rules and cognitive footprint at that!
While there is a good amount of new terminology introduced here, I found most of it pretty intuitive to wrap my head around - your mileage may vary depending on what your TTRPG background is primarily.
Over on the GM side of things, we have moves (very much in the PbtA vein - with general story moves, soft-hitting suspense moves and hard-hitting impact moves), the aforementioned suspense GM resource, diminishing pools, and challenges - a really pleasing way of structuring threats and monsters and the like in tiny little stat blocks.
(Which can also be linked, whether for particularly complex and dynamic scenarios or multi-bodypart enemies!)
If you're one of the comparatively few but extremely correct and sexy people who thought D&D 4e was actually a good game with fun ideas, you're in a for a treat - monsters in Grimwild have tiers (from mooks you can wipe out en masse to imposing elites and bosses), role descriptors (which have some further advice and tactics in the paid version of the game), and even ways to give the battlefield itself some textures and things to do. Tactics in a narrative game? It's possible, folks!
And if you thought SWN's faction turn or Blades' sprawl of Doskvol gangs was the coolest thing, you will be delighted too, with this surprisingly tight but useful section on writing up and running factions in the game world.
[Looks back on this post] Well, that's gotten quite long, and I haven't even gotten to talk about everything I actually enjoy about this game - because I like damn near everything I see here.
So, I will leave you with these - probably my favorite path (class) in the Warlock (which makes extensive use of many of the mechanics I brought up here), some monsters (which each have sensory details like smells and sounds, just like in the Wildsea!), and the very flexible Story Kits, which are basically modular and flexible do-it-yourself adventure outlines, a structure I find far preferable to standard massive linear modules.
Go get this game. Even if you don't play it directly (though I strongly encourage it!), there is a lot of good advice and plain fun ideas in here that can enrich either your existing D&D experience (I've not brought up basically any of this game's incredible rolling tables, Crucibles) and general TTRPG wisdom.
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When Dungeon World was released in 2012, it slammed the door to Powered by the Apocalypse open so hard it broke the hinges. By taking the re
"Everyone and their mother still seems to want an indie alternative to D&D. You know, the same dungeon crawls and all the fun memes, just without anything designed by Wizards of the Coast. Into this environment comes a new game which started with a solid Kickstarter campaign and only grew from there. The designers weren’t conceited enough to claim to be the next Dungeon World but they definitely wanted to be, and with some solid post-campaign momentum (#1 on DriveThruRPG as of this writing), it’s not entirely out of reach. I am of course talking about Grimwild." -@levelonewonk
Ok, borrowing this from that last post about Grimwild, because this has been tingling my math brain.
I love looking at how the math of tabletop mechanics works out. Ever since I sat down with some graph paper in high school and histogrammed the difference between 3d6 and 3d6 drop 1.
So the first thing I thought of when I saw this was "well, given a pool of size N, how long would it take it to get to 0, on average?"
Each die rolls either high (4-6), or low (1-3). After you roll a pool, you throw away all your low dice. If all your dice roll high, you roll again with the same pool size. If all your dice roll low, you're done.
An individual die has a 50 percent chance of rolling high. It always gets used in at least one pool roll, and whether it survives to another depends on what value it rolls. However, if it does roll high, we are now in the same situation we started in: we have one die. So we can express e, the expected number of pool rolls an individual die would survive, using a recurrence relation: e = 1 + 0.5 e.
Using some algebra gives us e = 2.
If we have a pool of size N, then we might be tempted to say we should also expect it to survive 2 pool rolls. After all, each individual die is expected to survive that long, and no die affects any other.
But the truth is more fun than that.
Let E(N) be the expected number of pool rolls we get out of a pool of size N. We know we don't get any more rolls if we have zero dice, so E(0) = 0. There's only one way to roll all highs, but there's N ways to roll one low and N-1 highs, since that could be any one of the N dice, and N(N-1)/2 ways of rolling two lows and N-2 highs, since that's how many different pairs of dice there are.
In general, there's N choose H ways of rolling H highs and N-H lows. That means the probability of any particular combination of highs and lows is (N choose L)(probability of H dice all rolling highs)(probability of N-H dice all rolling lows). The probability of K dice all rolling the same value is 0.5 ** K, so the probability of rolling exactly H highs with N dice works out to (N choose H)(0.5 ** H)(0.5 ** (N-H)) which simplifies to just (N choose H)(0.5 ** N).
Now we can get a recurrence relation for E(N) in terms of the probability of our next pool having H dice and the expected number of rolls that pool has, E(H).
E(N) = 1 + Σ (N choose H) (0.5 ** N) E(H), 0 ≤ H ≤ N
This is great! But slightly unsatisfying as if we look at the right hand side closely, we can see that we're defining E(N) in terms of E(N).
Which means that on average, we can expect a 4d pool to last E(4) = 368/105 ≈ 3.50 pool rolls, a 6d pool to last E(6) = 7880/1953 ≈ 4.03 pool rolls, and a 8d pool to last E(8) = 13303613/3011805 ≈ 4.42 pool rolls.
Now I really want to histogram them to see what the distributions look like, but it's late and I should go to bed.
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Grimwild character creation is already quite awesome.
(Not mentioned: the character relationships, or Bonds, which include our tiefling warlock having a Playful Rivalry with our outcast psion, who in turn feels Complex Respect towards her... Others are still pending lmao.)
Just wrapped up session 11 of my Ultraviolet Grimwilds campaign! I feel like I have a better handle on the strengths and weaknesses of both UVG and Grimwild now, and while I can't fully endorse either without at least a few caveats, I'm still very much enjoying both!
Maybe I should even clean up my conversion document enough to be able to post it to my blog or Itch 🙂↕️
(They also work together very well, because UVG will frequently give you only the tiniest bit of information about anything, while Grimwild is built entirely around making sure that's never an issue)
Grimwild RPG: Crowdfunded Success Stalls After Designer Disappears
A year ago, Grimwild looked like a rare win in the crowdfunding world. The tabletop role-playing game raised more than $87,000 across two BackerKit campaigns, released a free public edition on DriveThruRPG, delivered a full PDF to backers in January 2025, and even took home a Gold ENNIE Award at Gen Con this summer. The ENNIEs are one of the tabletop industry’s biggest honors, voted on by fans and awarded each year at the convention. Everything pointed toward a smooth hardcover release in mid-2025.
Then its designer vanished.
According to collaborators Per Janke and Luke Saunders, lead designer J. D. Maxwell has not been heard from in nearly two months. The Oddity Press website currently shows an expiration error [28 August 2025]. Both the printer and the BackerKit campaign page are locked under Maxwell’s accounts. That means the final step, authorizing physical production, cannot move forward without him.
The situation is unusual because the game itself is finished. The free edition was released, the full digital version was delivered, and fans have been running Grimwild sessions for months. The order for printed books has been placed with the manufacturer. The files are complete. However, production has not started because Maxwell is the only legal representative of Oddity Press who can give final approval to the printer.
Community moderators on the game’s official Discord confirmed they have “done everything they can” to contact Maxwell, including reaching out to the printer. They also filed a report with BackerKit’s Trust and Safety team, hoping the platform can intervene. For now, however, the hardcover edition is officially “on hold indefinitely.”
Crowdfunding always carries risk. This is not the usual story of a project collapsing before delivery. Grimwild exists, is playable, and has already been recognized by the industry. What remains uncertain is whether its backers will ever see the physical books they paid for, or if this case will join the long list of crowdfunding cautionary tales.
Where to Find Grimwild Online
Grimwild Free Edition (DriveThruRPG)
Grimwild: Cinematic Fantasy Roleplaying (DriveThruRPG):
